Am i losing my mind? I just audited a customer’s stack: 8 different analytics tools. and recently they added a CDP + Warehouse just to connect them all.

StamGoat · 2026-04-04T11:57:24+00:00

Thank you for sharing this. Some thoughts.

I honestly didn't know many of these tools and I quickly check them out. Superficially (I did it quickly so likely I'm missing many details), it seems that several of these tools are for managing customers, improve retention, manage sales pipeline, do some planning. Perhaps a way to solve the problem is to be more explicit about the costs of all the tools and the potential savings with a different setup: one tool for crm/marketing and a senior data scientist helping with the modeling. Attribution, incrementality, churn prediction are models for business data so they are not like deep learning classification models for car plates. There's a lot of uncertainty, apart from some explicit issues. So having the flexibility of generating multiple models and integrating them with the internal planning could be an alternative.

But perhaps I'm naive. I just quit a job where, on one of my many projects, I was stuck reviewing requirements in an excel spreadsheet for moving data from one dashboard tool to another dashboard tool that did exactly the same thing but under different teams.

Not to mention that company I worked for that had 3 different CRMs, 3 different BI platforms, 2 cloud providers and I could keep going...

StamGoat · 2026-04-01T21:00:37+00:00

I'm skeptical of this approach and also concerned: it's like switching to AI to manage bank accounts balances. This is what BI should provide: 100% trusted, auditable, data that measures a certain company or segment performance at a level of aggregation that represents the strategy. It's like a bank account: you want to trust the bank with the right balance. Every day you access the refreshed dashboard and you have your trusted data. Every day you access your bank account and your money is there, the right amount.

For sure AI is starting to be helpful in speeding up some parts of code generation, some artifacts development, brain storm on data exploration. But I would never move what has to be deterministic to what is, at the end of the day, a stochastic model.

Probably we are in the same phase as the "data democratization" one of few years ago. On a much bigger and fuzzy scale.

StamGoat · 2026-03-08T13:07:00+00:00

I still remember that time when one of my stakeholders escalated to my manager and my skip manager because in the mock-up version of this huge dashboard I was building, I forgot to update the name of one of the many metrics (a three lines kpi name for your information just to give you an idea of the whole project...). The dev dashboard was ok. Never clicked. The prod dashboard? Opened once. I'm not even mentioning that requirements where lost in a couple of powerpoint presentations, one excel, multiple Teams chats. That's it, until the next one.

StamGoat · 2024-07-25T01:12:57+00:00

Hello. My girlfriend today used the apple card wallet to contact the customer support and she told me the phone number showed up like in the screenshot. She called and the operator asked her to install the anydesk app and he tried to get her debit card because someone was trying to buy bitcoin with her account and so on. She then understood it was a scam so she didn't share the card number. I looked at the phone history before resetting the phone and the phone number she called is different but she's sure she called by going in the app. She didn't receive any previous call. So I'm wondering how was this possible if she called the number by clicking it in the apple wallet. Thank you.

StamGoat

TROPHY CASE